How to Create a Composite in Photoshop

[Music] hello there you're watching down ski the place to be to develop your creative skills and grow as a designer welcome guys to another livestream hello to everybody in the chat hate Aesir Spencer Fred mili Khaled Michal Noah Flo Tut's Stephan Bojan hey everybody thanks for joining today we're going to be learning how to create composites in Adobe Photoshop now a composite is a combination of multiple images into a single image and as you can see on screen here this is what we're going to be creating or we're gonna have a go something like this if you can hear that that small child in the background that is my son poppy and Leo are here today can you say hello oh so cute alright as always guys if you've got any comments please do drop them down below in the chat and I'll do my best to answer questions while we're doing the stream but if I don't answer your question don't worry we will do some Q&A after party at the end so stick around after the outro and I will be back right let's jump into this cool so to start with I've opened up this image here of the sea and if you would like to download any of these images they're available on iStock and they're all linked down below in the description of the video and you wanted to purchase them but to be honest if you're looking to just practice or kind of create your own composites you can use images from anywhere you know if it's a practice or personal use feel free to jump on Google you know you can get images from absolutely anywhere the takeaway from this video really is going to be learning the techniques and me sharing some tips about how you can go and create your own composite okay cool right so these are the images that I've got we've got some Lightning a parrot in mid-flight we've got the ocean waves as you saw a moment ago we have a ship that's going to be fun cutting that up we have some splash effects a tornado in a field which is pretty crazy and a whale tail whale tail okay so those are the images that we're going to be pulling all together into this one scene right yes Leo is here enjoying this right cool so the first thing I'm going to do is open up all of these images into Photoshop and this might just take a moment and I'm going to start by going into each image individually go to select all you've got a shortcut here command or control a you'll see it selects the entire canvas and then edit copy switch over to the main document and go edit and paste and it will paste that in and we can close that down now I'm just going to do this very quickly for all of the image images so we're just going to get all of these into the main document like so so I'm just selecting everything copying and pasting it back into the main document and you can see they're all different sizes and we're just going to name them as well so you can double click the text and we'll name each of these layers this is helpful naming layers because when we add more layers in a moment it will just it can get quite confusing when you've got 50,000 layers and you've got no idea what's what is our parrot and we have our lightning awesome and I'm also going to select the background layer and press command or control J to duplicate that and I'm going to double click the background and yeah yeah I'm doing a live stream okay to double click the background and rename this backup in case it goes wrong and then just switch that layer off there so that's going to be a backup we can even get better color what's going on over there so that's gray now it's just there in case it goes wrong so we've got all of our and local maps see right so we've got all of our layers in there all different sizes and the first one I'm going to work on is going to be the most challenging and that is the ship okay so we'll just switch that layer back on in fact we can turn C off create a new layer and just pick any really bright vibrant color so we'll go with an orange and we'll go with the paint bucket tool and just click and we'll just add a solid fill and we're going to just lock that layer there so we've got the fill barely bright orange one and we're going to select the ship layer and go channels now what we're going to do is we're going to try and cut out the ship now of course you can see there's a lot of detail in this it's going to be quite difficult to cut out and there's lots of different ways that you can do that you can do it with the magic wand tool you've got the quick selection tool I wouldn't advise using the pen tool because you know the air little bounce Keys crying I wouldn't advise using the pen tool because it will take a long long time however something we can do that is quite cool is if we go into channels we can click through these different channels and we'll look for the one that's got the most contrast so that's the most contrast between the sky background and the kind of detail up here the rigging or whatever you might call it I'm not a ship expert okay so we'll go with blue because you can see it's very dark here and the background is quite light so that's brilliant so we'll drag the blue channel down here to new and we've got blue copy Amica press command or control l and adjust the levels of that copy so what we ultimately trying to do is create more contrast here because believe me I've tried magic wandering all of these individual lines I did it last night and it wasn't very fun so we're going to bring the blacks down and bring the whites up and you can see it's creating more contrast between all of that detail and the background and it's just a case of bringing these in from either edge and you kind of want to try and find a balance and you can drag the mid-tones around as well just be careful you don't bring it in too far because if you bring it in too far then you might start to lose some of the detail around the edge and it gets a bit kind of thought it looks pixelated like a bit kind of bitty around the edge so I think that is pretty good you know for these bits of detail here so we can click OK and then hold command or control click on that channel that blue copy that we created and you'll see it makes a selection of that area oh hello hello there and with that selection just select the add layer mask option at the bottom of the layers panel and you'll see it cuts out the boat in fact that's actually the opposite of what we want so you can just press command or control I and it will invert that mask and you can see it's now cut out onto the orange and we can turn that off and we've got the background behind it now the reason we're cutting out against a bright orange color is because it allows us to really see if there's an area we've missed if we can make this ship look good against a bright orange background then when we come to blend it into some sea it's going to look pretty believable so we've got our we've done a lot of the work there especially on this detail using the channels we're now going to select the brush tool and a nice feathered brush with a hardness of 0 and then with the mask selected just select white as your foreground color and of course that is going to paint into the mask and if you press X to swap that round to black it go out of the mask so we've got the mask selected for our ship layer and we're just going to go round and just fill in all this detail of course here we don't want all of this to be see-through so we're just going to go around you can see we don't want this orange coming through so we're just going to go over this with our brush tool whose idea was it to have a toddler on the stream anyway and we're just going to go over all of this I'm going to try and do this bit nice and quickly we're not going to way too much about these parts here these kind of bits a rope because what we did with the channels has actually done a lot of the work so that's super handy we're just going to go around here and you can increase or decrease the size of your brush quickly by pressing the left or right square bracket on the keyboard and we're just going to brush around this like so hey yeah we go so we're just going to brush around all this detail now this step is quite important how effectively we cut out this ship is going to determine how good the end result looks so I'm going to try and do this bit as quick as I can while still making it look half decent it's really useful just to be I depress those left and right square brackets quickly adjust the size of the brush that's right squib this is masking the masking is a much I find a more effective way of working if you use things like the eraser tool that is okay but when you erase something it's permanent whereas if I hold shift and then left click on the mask you can see I can turn it off I can do the same again or I can drag the mask to the trash icon and delete it altogether and the image underneath is completely left alone you know we're not actually affecting the image so it gives you a lot more flexibility by adding masks what's the matter Leo you Restless hey am i boring you he's run our phone now doing a live stream wasn't challenging enough for just a ferris screaming child in the background as well cool okay right I remember of course if you do go outside like that just press X on the keyboard it will swap these colors over here at black and the white and you can just go back in now this bit here really needs some work we can't leave that being see-through because it will look a little bit rubbish so I'm just lightly brushing here I'm using a Wacom Intuos Pro if anyone is interested awesome tablet and the best thing about this is it really gives you a lot more control when retouching in Photoshop especially with things like pen pressure which is incredibly helpful so with a mouse you only kind of get that one pressure which is the left click but with a pen tool with a graphics tablet like the Wacom tablets you can control that pressure so I can press really lightly and it just gently brushes in so it helps kind of blend between different elements a lot more seamlessly and smoothly it's probably worth mentioning this is probably going to be quite a long one you know it's going to be a super super cool if you want to learn how to do this kind of thing with your own images and if you have just joined and you've missed anything or whatever it will be live on YouTube later on so remember we're just using the left and right square brackets to decrease that brush size nice and quickly and then I can bring it back up to work on these larger areas and this just takes a lot of practice really but once you kind of get used to it you become familiar with this it will just speed up your retouching process so much and it becomes so much quicker right and we can go down the mast here I hope you've got no ship experts watching because I'm probably using all of the wrong terminology although I did learn earlier that the front of a boat is called the bow and the rear is called a stern so in prep for this tutorial I've actually learned something about ships which is quite quite cool cool right okay we've got the sail here and we're just going to kind of try and go over this really quickly because this bit does take a long time it's probably less fun when we get onto the other stuff it's going to be really cool once it all starts to come together and as I said this is the most complicated part this is the big most complicated and the most tedious part of the whole process is cutting out a frigging ship so there we go we're nearly done I think nearly done hopefully so I'm just brushing straight down the middle there and because we've got that feathered brush I'm brushing down the middle and it's just catching the edge so I'm not kind of doing this and going outside I'm just brushing down the middle very lightly with the Wacom tablet and that the edge that feathered edge of the brush is really helping to kind of capture these edges without going too far out hey Gavin a little dance Keys gone out of the room at the moment because he's he's being rather noisy sometimes he's well behaved and sometimes he's he has a little tantrum that he might come back on at the end he might come back on at the end I'm not sure where they've gone actually cool okay right for the most part I think we're looking pretty good hopefully so if we zoom back out and I switch off this orange layer we've got a ship on the transparent background which is looking pretty good for the most part now I'm going to remove this flag just because I don't like it so let's just get rid of that flag we'll get that here we go I don't know what flag it is that we've just removed it now the other thing we're going to need to do to make sure that this is fully cut out because we do just want the ship is we need to go around the edges here we've got all these clouds and we can do this with the feathered brush so we can just start brushing away these larger areas here with a large brush in fact what it will do is if I go into the channels and select blue copy and just hold command or ctrl and click what it's going to do is select all of this kind of rigging these ropes up here and just make sure I don't actually brush those away by mistake so when working around here you can see that doing this is going to keep all of that detail seeing as we went to the trouble of setting up a separate channel at the beginning so let's just go around all that we don't want to brush tool' around all of the rigging manually because you've already use the channel to do that so we're just going it over like so there we go just either side nice and quickly cool right that's done a lot of the hard work and then just to see select go to select and deselect that's command or control D and it will deselect those marching ants and we can just continue to brush this away we're going up here now we can go in between these lines now if you do miss a bit if you get bored here when you want to skip ahead then you can do what I'm probably going to do is I'm going to do some of this now because I could spend hours doing this to do it properly and then we're going to go ahead and we can always because this is on a mask we've got that flexibility as I said earlier to come back and we can go and refine it further through one so this is quite handy really because if you're making a composition sometimes you might be you know compositing images together and you don't know if it's actually going to work yet so you can do it very rough kind of just mask it very roughly get all of the elements in place check it works and then once it's all heading in the right direction you can go in and really refine the detail otherwise you could spend hours refining everything and actually at the end it looks a bit rubbish and doesn't work in the first place so I think we'll leave it fairly rough in a moment now this ship because it is on water is going to be quite handy because our image here is on a kind of similar type of water so you can see that actually it blends pretty seamlessly so I very carefully selected this image and using this feather brush is really going to help this kind of this sea here blend into that other image of the sea and we've got some clouds behind I'm going to leave these and maybe just remove a little bit more of this I'm going to leave some of those other clouds because as you saw in the original we've got a very stormy backdrop so some of those clouds may even blend into the clouds behind right so we've got a very crude cut out of our ship and we can switch on our sea layer and I'm just going to lock that in place there and we can now move our boat around and go up to edit free transform and even adjust the angle just so it's pointing up a little bit and position it so that you're happy and then select the mask again and with that brush we can just go in and remove some of this blue now we don't have to go and remove all of the blue what we can actually do is select an adjustment layer from the bottom and go hue and saturation and if we right click that hue and saturation layer and select create clipping mask you'll see the arrow appears and this is only affecting the ship layer below so if I select that mask again if I double click the hue and saturation layer rather what we can do now is adjust this and it's only affecting that layer below so I'm going to adjust the hue a little bit to try and blend this sea image with the sea at the bottom of the boat maybe bring the saturation down a little bit and then hold down command or control to select the marching ants and let's see what this affects okay so let's deselect that selection right so we've got our hue and saturation mask selected let's press command or ctrl I to invert it and then what I'm going to do is just brush in white so you can see here I don't want to go and change this because that that adjustment layer will change the entire color of the ship but I do want to just use that feather brush to go around this bit and change that see that is a very dark blue to a slightly different shade that matches more our original image so I'm just brushing over all of the sea here and you can see it just helps it blend in a lot more smoothly there we go like so so I can turn that on and off and you can see the difference that it makes there and we can go in and we could remove some more of this if we wanted as well so as I say you can go in and spend as much time doing this as you like just kind of blending around the edges cool so for the most part we've done a very a very crude job at cutting out our ship on to the sea and what we can do now is we can add what we got next we could add the storm next so we can switch that layer on go to edit free transform and bring this up scaling from the center holding shift and alt and then we can do is if we add a layer mask to this in fact let's undo that if you hold alt and add a layer mask it will fill that with black and then we can use white and our feather brush and start feathering this in and of course this layer is above our ship but if we drag that below and make sure we've got that mask selected for storm rather than the actual layer itself we can then brush in this storm and again just zoom in and just brush along the edges so it's just finding a balance between where the storm sky starts and the wavy background ends so using that feathered brush can really help in just kind of softly blending those two together so something like this now at the moment we've got these kind of gray bits here because actually that is the gray from the original sea image and the storm has kind of got a bit of a blue sort of hue to it Fred Fred asks out of curiosity do you usually use stock photos in your work or would you take your own photos and I use stock photos if they are right for that particular project sometimes stock photos can look a bit cheesy which is something I try to avoid but you know if they work great if they don't and I need to either get a photographer or take my own photos and that's something that I would consider so above the storm layer we're going to select hue and saturation to create a new adjustment layer and if we select colorize and we'll go for like a blue color you can see it changes the entire color of those clouds now we don't really want to do that because you know the tornado itself has got some pretty nice color to it however we can right click that and select create clipping mask and again it will only affect that layer below in fact and some do that and some do that last step so we've got the blue here and it's affecting the entire storm layer so if we actually use black there we go and mask over these parts of the storms we want to keep that color there we don't want that gray though so we're masking over the color that we want to keep and you can see we've just brought in the gray we didn't want that so we can press X on the keyboard and just brush that out with white so that basically that hue and saturation layer just goes over the top of the storm layer and it just brings in a bit more blue and you can right click and select create clipping mask and it will only affect that layer just then it was affecting the sea layer below and of course you can double-click the thumbnail here and adjust that color if you want to okay let's um do the clipping mask okay now we need to know of course we need to have that without a clipping mask because the see layer is quite far below but that's fine we don't want it to affect the see so anything we don't want it to affect we can just brush that out so there we go if I switch it on and off you can see the difference it makes and you can even drop that pasty down if it's just a little bit too strong there we go cool honestly guys this is such a complicated process so hopefully this is helpful that's what the good old trusty step backward and undo features for right what else have we got to add we've got some Lightning so we can go and add that we'll just bring this up above everything else and I believe I swapped this round so go to edit transform and flip horizontal and again just edit free transform and hold shift to scale this up and double click to set this in place and you could just drop that a pasty down a bit and you can see where the Lightning is going to go so we'll position it somewhere somewhere like this just adjust that scaling and double click again to set that in place once it's in place we can bring the opacity back up and again I'm going to add a layer mask and use black and that feathered brush to just brush round that we don't really want any of the background we don't want the purple we just literally want the lightening so at the moment I've got the mask selected if we just click onto another layer or just click on this layer itself you can see you can toggle here between the layer and the mask so that's something that I often get confused with or mixed up with I just have the wrong bit selected so now we want to select the layer and go to image adjustments and hue and saturation the difference doing it this way is that it won't create an adjustment layer it will just affect the image so sometimes that's fine just because you might not want to document with you know hundred thousand adjustment layers which can get quite complicated but of course you don't have the flexibility to change it as easily in future ok let's try and get that hue about right in fact we could actually use colorize again that might be easier so we'll give it a very specific color and we could drop that saturation down something like this and then we could adjust the blending mode we'll change that to screen yeah let's go with screen and with the mask selected we're just going to brush out that bottom part now you can see the lightening does have a bit of a glow over here we're just going to remove that by selecting the layer and then going up to image adjustments and levels and we'll bring the white here on the right we're going to bring that down so you can see we still very much keep that shape of the lightening but we're just kind of softening that glow a little bit so that's how it did look before and this is how it looks now a squib if you're having masking problems please do stick around at the end and what I'll do is I'll go over masking in a little bit more detail there's basically most of this tutorial is using a feathered brush and using masks so once you understand the principles of masks I know it's like really complicated at first but once you kind of get it and you become confident and familiar with it it just makes creating composites like this so much easier right of course I want to bring the lightening layer down as well so we'll bring that behind our ship and what else have we got splash cool so we've got this splash effect here which is awesome and the fact that it's on a dark background is going to make it even more awesome because if we click the blending mode and change it to screen or maybe lighten lighten you can see it just blends straight into the background so if you have an image shot against black and you use either lighten or screen it can blend it into the background and akin we're going to add another layer mask sorry squib and we're just going to brush around this as I said you can take a lot more time and care when you do your version now the moment is kind of facing the wrong way so we can go to edit transform and flip horizontal and again we're just going to brush around those edges just without having hard edges hanging around and then you can position this so you can see I'm using that feather brush just to chop into the C and position this something like that what you could even do is go to edit transform and warp and just give this an arc and then a Bend of let's say 20% so you can see it just bends it ever so slightly and just press ENTER to set press ENTER twice to set and it just kind of gives it that sort of curving shape and scale it down adjust the rotation so the shortcut here for edit and free transform command or ctrl T is definitely worth learning and then again we can select the layer go to image adjustments hue and saturation and again select colorize bring that saturation down we're just looking to really blend this into the main body of C as much as possible so you can see a lot of what we're actually doing is very similar so it's one when you learn these different techniques you can then actually apply them to your own composites where can I get that feather brush as V asks if you go to the brush tool on the left and select the drop-down up here it's part of Photoshop default brushes so these are all the defaults here and you can click any of these brushes in the top left corner now you want to have one where the hardness is set to zero if you bring it up to 100% it will have a much hard so bringing it all the way down to zero hardness gives you that nice soft feathered edge it's probably one of those tools that I actually use the most on working in Photoshop right okay we've also got an image of a parrot now this one's going to be super easy to do this parrot is going to be really really small so we can just get the magic wand click on the white adjust your tolerance if you need to to get the right selection but you know it's pretty easy to cut this one out now at the moment the parrot is obviously too large so we're going to use free transform again and hold shift and alt scale towards the center will make him a nice and small now this ship might sink so he's thinking I'm just going to get the hell out of Dodge so the parrot is actually flying away from the ship so that's why I specifically chose this a shot of the parrot and what I'm going to do is just drop that opacity a tiny bit now the reason I like to do this is we don't want to we don't want the bird to obviously be transparent because that just looks ridiculous but the colors of the parrot are very vivid here and just by dropping that a pasty just 10 20 % can just help that blend a little bit more subtly into the image now the power is actually flying as well so I'm going to go to filter blur and motion blur we're going to introduce a little bit of movement now you can see the angle of power is flying if I bring this down you can see something like this so I'm going to try and match the angle here with the angle of the bird obviously if I were to bring it this far he's not that fast no bird is that fast but there might be I don't know much about birds but we're just going to give it a bit of blur something really subtle so you can see the difference there that's without the blur that's with the blur and it helps kind of hide this fringing these little white bits around the edge as well and of course we can go and adjust the size and make him a tad smaller if we need to or a bit bigger a fact let's undo that let's keep him a little bit bigger we've got our bird our parrot and we have a whale as well we have a fricken whale or a whale's tail and again I've chose this image specifically because it has all of this kind of water and splash nests and stuff going on so it kind of fits in with the what we're doing anyway so first of all I'm going to use the magic wand tool and just start clicking in the whale now the tolerance is just about right here that you might need to adjust the tolerance basically the tolerance determines how much of the image is selected so if you have a tolerance of 10 it's going to be much more picky about what colors it selects if you have a tolerance of 50 it's going to most likely select more of the image so you can see that I selected part of the sea and because the tolerance is set to 50 it just selected pretty much the whole thing sort of so if you can't get the right selection just adjust your tolerance if you accidentally select something by mistake as I did there just go edit and go undo magic wand and it will take you back a step right where we've selected most of the tail so I'm pretty happy with that so with that selection made just go add layer mask bottom here and we've got the whale's tail and I can go over here go to edit free transform and we'll hold shift and scale that down and just find somewhere to position that possibly where there is already a little bit of a kind of splash and just adjust that sizing now of course that selection wasn't perfect using the magic wand tool as expected so there's a few little gaps here but that is fine with the good old feather brush that we've been using and white and the mask selected we can go back in and we'll just redraw those parts that we missed so the magic wand tool is very very good to just make that initial selection and as we use channels earlier on the ship itself to get a lot of that kind of rigging and the ropes and everything it was really helpful for the most part but then we just went in and kind of got the rest with masking in a feathered brush so sometimes if you've got quite a complicated scene like with the ship and you're trying to cut that out there might be several different ways that you need to employ to make an effective cut out rather than just kind of use this tool and then it instantly does it all for you yes a Seif says the best tool to cut images is the pencil I agree if it's a product shot or it's something with very clean lines however if you do pen tool this entire ship I can tell you from personal experience where I had to cut a net out for 8 hours that it can take a long time so it's definitely about choosing the right tool for the job and Photoshop has got many of them which is very very handy okay so we've cut out the whale's tail and actually we can brush in a bit more of this so I'm very subtly brushing this in you can see I'm pressing X very quickly to swap the color from white to black just to get a little bit of that back in there and actually you can see the whale it's you know it looks a bit kind of clean-cut so with the main layer selected I'm going to go to filter blur and blur more and it just blurs that layer again helps just kind of soften that fringing that white effect around the edge and it's pretty small in the background anyway so a little bit of blur just kind of helps blend that in right something else that really annoyed me with this image is the I'm not sure what this bit of the ships called the bit pointing out the middle of the middle out the front because it doesn't really follow this angle which is something that I really wanted so I'm actually just going to draw a shape here and we're going to try and adjust this so it follows the angle so I'm just going to create a new layer pick another gloriously bright color like blue and we'll set that at twenty percent opacity and just lock it now I'm going to use this as a guide now with the main ship layer selected you can use the lasso tool to make a selection now we're going to want to drag all around here and capture all of these rope areas that are specifically connected to the front and we're going to go around the head of the person on the front of the ship again I'm not sure what that thing's called the little statue on the front there we go we'll capture all of this so we've got a selection of the entire front part of the ship and we've got all the ropes that are attached to this as well the reason we include the ropes is when we move this in a moment we don't want to kind of break the ropes in half so we've got a selection now made with the lasso tool I've got a feather of ten pixels and we've got the ship layer selected now if this next bit works which I hope it will it's really cool go to edit free transform and we're going to transform this selection so you can rotate it and all this kind of thing what we're going to do is hold down command or control over one of the corners so you see instead of the resize icon you get this white arrow and I can now left-click still holding command or control and it allows me to pull this out of shape hmm okay that didn't quite work so I'm just going to go back a few steps and I want to save this selection because you know I've made this lasso selection I don't want to make it again so from the paths panel on the right I'm just going to click new path from the bottom and type front of ship so when I deselect out that I've still got that selection oh no I haven't oh now strange it doesn't want me to make the selection bizarre okay that's fine if it doesn't want me to make the selection I'll just make a new layer fill it with a color just move this layer up a bit and I'll use this as a selection instead so sometimes when you get a very complicated document Photoshop doesn't want to do what you want it to do oh hello so we'll just make that selection on a separate layer and hide it simple as that and then you can use command or control + left click and it will just make that selection again just say it's kind of having to re lassu it now the ship didn't work because that still got that mask attached to it so if I right-click the ship layer and go convert to smart object and then right-click it again and go rasterize layer' it's now any odd new layer and it has no mask so if you do that just be sure that you're ready to go ahead with it and now we can press command or control + left click on that selection layer boom we've got our selection we've got our ship layer now on its own and in fact we've got hue and saturation layer as well now that's okay so we can leave that layer so with that selection yeah with that selection made yeah so we've got our selection made there okay we've got a ship layer edit free transform there we go hold down command or control and we're just going to pull this up now what we're actually doing by holding down command or control on a corner is we're distorting the shape now if not I've not got my guide turned on so I'm going to try and line this up by eye and it might be a case of just rotating it as well scaling up it's very tricky because what we've got to do is we got to try and get this the angle right and get it back in the same place so it kind of joins up with the statue but also we've got the the rope up here so what should have done is left my layer one which was my guide I made turned on just so I could line the angle up but while I'm doing this selection I won't let me turn that layer back on and press ENTER to set and then just go to deselect I think that looks pretty good and we've got some blue around the bottom here I think that's from that a pane and we can just go in and just correct that remove out that kind of deep sea blue color that's absolutely fine and of course you could spend you know a lot more time doing this kind of retouching it so it looks perfect as you can see here when we cut out the ship at the beginning there's a few bits here that you could have spent a bit more time on but you know doing this kind of retouching and doing it well can take a long time so when you're doing yours I definitely recommend spending a bit of time doing it and of course up here we've kind of created a bit of an issue here after making that adjustment but I had to rotate that front bit because it was really annoying me that it wasn't straight so with the ship selected now this is a good instance where I will just use the eraser tool with a nice feathered eraser brush and just quickly erase that out I'm not sure exactly what those lines are there from probably that adjustment layer or something but that's fine we'll just quickly remove that in fact if we make that selection again what I'm going to do is just drag this up just so those ropes touch those two there and just try and reposition this either using the mouse or the arrow keys and here we go something something like this and this last one up here well you know we can get around that by using the clone stamp tool again we've got a nice feathered brush and I'm just going to hold alt and left-click and we go current layer okay let's erase that we'll just we'll just redraw this part for some reason the clone stamp tool doesn't want to sample this layer there we go so just changing that to current and below there we go in fact let's go sample all layers because we've created a composite of lots of different layers so it can be quite complicated making sure that the right layer is selected and then just use the eraser tool just to erase that bit around the edge and this is the benefit of using those soft brushes it is really really good especially if you're using a Wacom tablet as well for just brushing that in and we've create created a few the well ours it couldn't be them we've created a few random oddities here basically from adjusting the angle of the mast we've created all manner of problems but in my opinion it's definitely worth it so I'm just using the eraser tool to go around and any of these random kind of things that are popped up things like this that haven't quite gone correctly you can spend time adjusting it or just literally go in and remove it now a good thing about this particular composite is it is a ship in the middle of a storm at sea so it's it's not like a clean cut product shot so if you have a few edges that are rough of course spend as much time as you like if you have some rough edges it's a lot less noticeable now let's just switch on our adjustment layer again and we can delete these selection layers we don't really need those and we don't need our bright orange layer anymore I don't think we need backup in case it goes wrong because so far touchwood it's going okay and then at the top of the parrot layer we can select adjustments from the bottom and select curves and we can just adjust these bring this down here and bring it up on this side so you kind of get like a wavy line shape and just click the I at the bottom you can see we've added a bit of contrast there it kind of makes this image a little bit more dramatic and we can also add a photo filter and you can select from a number of presets here or you can choose your own color and you can bring this all the way up and you can adjust this slider you get lots of different types of presets here I'm going to stick with the default one just bring that down to let's go for about 40% what's happening you've stuck a plaster on yourself what earth have you done that and again you can turn the preview on and off and in fact actually I'm going to select my ship layer go up to filter and just select blur more just to blur this a bit more you can see again just blurring it helps kind of with that fringing and just makes it a little bit softer and I'm just going to drop the opacity of the whale slightly and as discussed earlier we don't want to go down to that because that just looks silly you know but just dropping it down a little bit just helps blend it all together and the splash as well if we duplicate that layer by right-clicking and selecting duplicate we can move this up and I'm just going to mask away some of this we don't need the whole thing I just want this top part really and we're going to send that backwards behind the ship and we're just going to use it to help connect up the storm with the sea so we're just bringing this down in size yes seif says you can use color balance or gradient map yep you've got color balance and gradient map both all down here as well in fact there's tons of different things you could do to play around with the color and give it certain you know filters and again I'm going to drop the opacity of this down just helping that blend into the background I'm actually going to add some rain as well let's just have a look at the original it's a lot more bluer isn't it okay let's no let's just go a bit off script here will it create a color balance adjustment layer and we'll try and bring in some of that blue you there we go it's pretty easy bring the opacity down just a pinch and just use that feathered brush to remove it from the main body of the boat and I think the splash yeah the splash down here that we originally created I'm just gonna maybe make that tad smaller and just drop the opacity of that down as well just a little bit about 1020 percent just to help blend blend it into the rest of the image now because I said it was important to learn masks earlier this is why because now we've created the composite I can look at it and go okay this is working as a composite I like it but there's a lot of areas where I could do more work so I could go back in and I've got all of these things on separate layers all with masks and I can go back here and I can still fully edit virtually everything so at the moment if I were doing this for a project I'd consider this like a draft edit it's taken me half an hour to an hour and then I would spend a lot more time going in and refining everything particularly this bit where it kind of goes into his head but as I say it just spent it depends how much time you want to spend on it the important takeaway here is learning all these techniques for doing this right cool I'm going to just bring photofiltre opacity so that's the great thing you can add adjustment layers you can adjust all the colors but you can then adjust the opacity of those adjustment layers as well will you pick wires now one last thing we are going to add is some rain now I love this is super super cool we'll just lock all of our adjustment layers here and anything we create needs to go underneath those we want those adjustment layers to affect everything so if we place something above it it's not going to be affected by all of those color effects and curves etc so we'll create a new layer and we'll just fill that with solid black using the paint bucket tool and got to filter down to noise and select add noise and just bring this up to let's go three hundred percent select uniform and monochromatic click OK you should have something that looks like this and then go to filter blur and select motion blur and this is going to be the angle of your rain so if you angle it something like this coming down from top right to bottom left and just bring that distance up it will look something like this and click OK and we've got these bits around the edge here but we can just free front there free transform this if I could speak and just so that goes to the edge and then change the blending mode to soft light or overlay overlay or soft light they're both very similar over layers a bit more kind of stronger and more enhanced version of soft light which as the name suggests is a bit more subtle but we've added some rain there we can call this layer rain and we can even duplicate that go to edit free transform and hold alt and shift and scale up from the center so we get different sizes of rain as well just to really create a bit of variation and we can also go filter blur Gaussian blur Gaussian Gaussian however you say it just to kind of add blur to that rain as well so we have some rain that looks like this really kind of subtle in the background and then we have rain that looks like this and we can actually bring the opacity of that down in fact let's try that again with a few different settings so we're going add that noise again let's try 400 this time filter blur motion blur and we'll bring that distance down so you can see I had it quite the distance was a lot higher before we'll bring that down something like around about 100 and we'll do the same thing let's see how this looks and we'll change that to soft light there we go that's a little bit better I think so that rain is you know not as blurred not as long as it was before so just by going into motion blow and bringing that distance down it just kind of makes the I guess the length of the rain that's the right way of saying it a little bit shorter and we can adjust the opacity depending on how visible or invisible you would like the rain to be so you can adjust both of those layers and there we go the colors a little bit different isn't it let's adjust that color balance okay let's work on that rain a bit more try and make that a little bit bigger so we'll blow this up let's see what settings I used screen oh I did use screen hahaha okay let's try different blending mode interesting screen doesn't seem to give the same effect here hmm that's right we can stick with soft light and we've got our other rain copy there so you can layer on as many different types of rain different sizes it just kind of makes it a little bit more believable if everything is a little bit more random - there's variation in some of the sizes varying the different capacities all that kind of stuff let's try darken no whoo goodness no goodness no hmm let's try one more let's bring the noise down a bit or try doing a super super low one okay we're going for like 30 on the blur okay so screen gives us that but if I go to adjustments and levels and adjust these sliders there we go that's not bad and then just go free transform and scale that up there we go and I can add a bit of a blur on that so the sizes that I'm using will be different when you come to make your composite because it depends on the entire size of your canvas actually working on a a massive canvas blur or 50 pixels will look very different to if you're working on a canvas that is 100 pixels so the size may vary okay right we've got a few different rain layers which is great because now what we can do is we can blend all of these together until we get the desired rain effect cool and I think that's everything will you be quiet I don't even know what he's saying he's just like chattering away to himself oh [Music] yes as Fred suggested use levels to darken the rain so we've set the mode to screen now and we've used those levels just to kind of darken that so if you get anything that looks a bit light a bit washed out just go up to image adjustments levels and I'll just adjust those settings until you kind of get the right effect and as I said you could spend hours at hours doing this and I hope you do because the end result will be so much better kind of spending a bit more time doing it but hopefully this was a introduction to creating composites in Photoshop and I hope you enjoyed it so as always I'm going to jump off now be back in a few minutes with this little monkey for the after party thanks guys for joining the stream and yeah leave a comment down below if you enjoyed it take care and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Dansky

Views: 25,927

Keywords: photoshop cs6 tutorial, adobe, adobe photoshop, designs, photoshop, photoshop tutorial, photoshop cs6, tutorial, photoshop tutorial cs6, composite, compositing, composition, composite tutorial, compositing tutorial, photoshop composite tutorial, photoshop compositing tutorial, how to create composite, how to create composite in photoshop, compositing in photoshop, compositing in photoshop tutorial, combine photos, photo manipulation, photo manipulation tutorial

Id: GCnn6dQK1Wk

Length: 63min 10sec (3790 seconds)

Published: Fri May 19 2017